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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

I recorded the showroom sales and the delivery of our brand new Kawai RX-2 Blak yesterday. Did some editing to move it along. The guys were fantastic bringing it in and a joy to talk to. Incidentally, they are the whole piano company. They close the shop to deliver.

The piano is for my wife who has been playing her childhood Kolher & Campbell spinet since she started in the early 70's. She finally got up off that thing and said.... "That's it, I want a new grand piano."

Our house is plenty big but still tricky as to where to put it. We also heat the house almost entirely in the wintertime with two wood stoves. Humidity runs just under 20% during the heating season. My Mother also lives with us and is having dry skin itching issues. We knew we had to do something about the dryness for that and the piano. I purchased two whole house humidifiers. One on each end of our long contemporary rancher. Today the humidity is up to 32% throughout so we are getting there.

Great video and you guys seem really cool to hang out with. Ha. Was the owner delivery a normal thing or did they do it special just for you?

No not special. They are a low overhead business. They are an authorized Kawai dealership the runs out of an industrial park unit. Pretty small footprint, three employees. Nothing fancy. Business through word of mouth and craigs list. They got consecutive sales awards. A nice walnut plaque from Kawai two years in a row.

The showroom doesn't open until 11 AM so they do their deliveries in the morning.. not always getting back by 11.

Haha, I watched the video holding my breath! I couldn't watch when my piano was delivered! Also, the owner of the store I bought from came to personally deliver mine as well... It was definitely noticed. Congrats on your awesome piano!

Jenn has been floating on clouds for the last two days with her new piano. I told her to be careful cause she sometimes has trouble with her arms getting sore.

She also might be accustomed to playing a certain way to coax the sound out of the spinet that she wants. Once she adjusts to the grand, she may have less issues. Still, overplaying could be a problem she should be careful about.

Jenn wanted a Yamaha only because she remembered playing them years ago in school and always like playing them. I knew nothing about pianos so I dove in and learned everything there is to know about them in a day on the internet

Jenn also was hoping to spend 10G or less. Didn't take too long for me to figure out and convince her to go higher.

20G was too much which dropped used Steinway out.

Short list was Yamaha something in the 6ft or less size. We went to a showroom but I really didn't want to spend big bucks on a new piano. They had Steinway, Yamaha and Boston. I remembered the salesman saying something about "other brands with plastic parts"

I had an appt to see a used Kawai RX-1 private owned because I saw Kawai was a direct competitor to Yamaha with seemingly a lot of innovation that has been proven. Then researching the Kawai, I got hooked on the "Blak" version with the newest action. I like the idea of the more stable materials design of the Millenium III. Our house can have temp and humididty swings so I think the advanced materials will help prevent action issues in the future.

I saw a couple of pianos on CL... made a phone call. Guy got back to me and said if you come here to look, you will leave with a piano. I looked, I bought. The price I got blew away the showroom piano price.

Neither of us is a total connoisseur of what a piano should sound like although I am an audiophile myself. I simply put trust in my research and went one model up from the RX-1 to the RX-2 mostly because I read a few times that the RX-2 was worth the price difference.

So we ended up with a brand new RX-2 built in 8-2012 for $4500 less than a similarly sized new Yamaha.

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"Imagine it in all its primatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls - our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure!" - William Carlos Williams

Neither of us is a total connoisseur of what a piano should sound like although I am an audiophile myself. I simply put trust in my research and went one model up from the RX-1 to the RX-2 mostly because I read a few times that the RX-2 was worth the price difference.

So we ended up with a brand new RX-2 built in 8-2012 for $4500 less than a similarly sized new Yamaha.

You made the right decision, hootowl. The RX-2 is only $3,000 or so more expensive than the RX-1, and the RX-2 is 5" longer. With pianos in this size category, 5 extra inches means a lot. The guys at "Piano Buyer" call the RX-2 "a must-try for those shopping for a piano under 6' long".